OpenMapi: Free Libraries For Microsoft's Mail-Interface

Several groupware developers have come together to work on Project OpenMapi, an open source API, based on Microsoft's Mapi.

The project is supported by the German companies Wilken, VipCom AG, Topalis with Zafara and will provide open source libraries with an API based on Mapi. It will support various backends (e. g. Zarafa servers, Teamxchange) and will be used to develop different programming languages ( C, Java, PHP, Python and C#) on operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

The most important of the libraries, Nmapi, written in C# is suitable for Mono and .Net. Additionally, a proxy will be developed to provide a unified interface between clients and servers, independent of how the protocol for communication with the server is written and without any cumbersome client configuration.

OpenMapi will provide unified access to different servers

Communication with the proxy will be via Java-Library, Jmapi and gateways will provide support for IMAP and POP3 with an Active-Sync gateway with support for mobile devices.

Nmapi, Jmapi are licensed to GNU LGPL. The programme downloads and the path to the source text repositories have been announced on the OpenMapi homepage, but are not yet available.

This past weekend the Wine project released a new version of its Windows emulator. Apart from the numerous obligatory bug fixes, the release includes improvements to the Direct3D 10 API and an initial support for the Open Audio Library (OpenAL).